Quotes About Survival

I had gone to a talent show - I was interested in American hip-hop music - with my older brother, to another town, and my town was attacked. I went from having an entire family to the next minute not having anything. It was very painful.

The movies saved my life. I grew up in the great depression, the only child of a pair of star crossed lovers. My father lost his job. My mother drank. They fought. The movies were my escape.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.

I became bitter, hard, cold. I was always on a panic - couldn't buy clothes or a good place to live.

Panic is a natural human response to danger, but it's one that severely compounds the risk.

Money is just paper that gets us through life.

'Parable of the Sower' is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American novels.

Antarctica is a paradise compared to Mars.

The world of 'The Hunger Games' is a paranoid survivalist's dream.

When a parasite moves to a new habitat, it can find new hosts through a process called the trans-species jump. Often, the new host has no resistance; it and the parasite haven't had time to adjust to each other through natural selection (it is frequently not in the best interest of a parasite to kill its host quickly).

We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites.

We didn't have running water. We had to get water from wells, and there was a stint where I lived with my grandma where we had to get water, bring it over to the house. You had to boil the water because you never knew what parasites were in the water.

I was haunted by a bear attack that happened in Algonquin Park in 1991. The problem was that I don't believe in ghosts, so that ruled out an exorcism. My other choice was to start writing.

I spent 18 months with the furniture parked in front of the radiators, cooking as quickly as I possibly could to use the least amount of gas and electricity. I unscrewed the lightbulbs in the hallway, unplugged everything at the wall so not even the LCD display was blinking away on the oven.

A simple leather jacket... has gotten me through cocktail parties in New York and cold nights in Afghanistan.

We have gone through everything as a nation - partition, dictatorship, and even anarchy.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

Not being dead is my version of partying. So far, so good.

It's a cold world out there, and this world will pass you by if you give another man anything over yourself.

Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.

My father passed from cancer in 2000; his brother died of cancer before that. My grandfather died of cancer.

In 'Payanam,' I play a passenger of a flight which is hijacked.

As a man, if you lose your wife, it's a horrible experience, especially with kids. But when one person passes away and you're still alive, people still depend on you - that's what you have to lean on.